Posted
by
timothy
on Monday April 18, 2005 @07:50AM
from the they're-already-late dept.

Ant writes "CBS News has an article, images, and a free streaming video clip of Elwood (Woody) Norris' invention of a working flying machine, AirScooter. He asked one of his test pilots to demonstrate it for 60 Minutes on a hilltop outside San Diego, California. It can fly for 2 hours at 55 mph, and go up to 10,000 feet above sea level. This week, he will receive America's top prize for invention. It's called the Lemelson-MIT award -- a half-million dollar cash prize to honor his life's work, which includes a brand new personal flying machine.
Woody Norris' and others' inventions are for NASA's 'The Highway in the Sky.' It is a computer system designed to let millions of people fly whenever they please, and take off and land from wherever they please, in their very own vehicles."

If this thing is "real", we're going to need 15 years to get things straightened out so people aren't flying drunk, teenagers aren't racing their air scooters in public air corridors, and Starbucks has a chance to start opening outlets at 10,000 feet.

15 years? Try 1500... We've had cars for over 100 years now and we still haven't found a way to keep people from driving drunk and teanagers from racing in public. We probably never will. Now, Starbucks at 10,000 feet... well... there's something that wouldn't surprise me. They've already run out of space on the ground. I know of a place where you can sit in one Starbucks and look out the window across the street at guess what... Another Starbucks!

How are they going to prevent people from flying over private property?

They're not. At 500 feet above the highest obstacle, (1000 feet over a built up area), the skies are open (subject to air traffic regs). If you don't want people flying over your property, you'll have to apply to the FAA to declare your property restricted airspace. Good luck.

(Below the above altitudes, you can report such aircraft to the FAA, unless they're on approach to or departure from an airport.)

(Oh, and if you feel like just putting up a 500 foot tower to raise the "floor", better make sure you've got approval, lest the FAA declare it a hazard to navigation and make you take it down.)

And what about International Borders? I can just see Mexicans crashing into houses in CA or AZ or TX (or vice versa). We already have problems with uninsured aliens and cars, adding planes would be even worse! Plus would we need SkyCops to make sure the regs were followed? If so how do you "pull them over" and give a ticket??

My problem with this one is that it was listed as a prototype, and the only one they had.

I recall reading about the Moller sky car in Popular Science years ago (5? 10? 15? it was a long time ago;) except then it was a 7 engine beast able to fly 400mph, get 20 mpg with 4 passenagers, along with VTOL. I guess that was merely a paper proposal, although it wasn't presented as such.

At the present rate of oil consumption, which is increasing by the way, the crude oil reserves will be exhausted in about 20 years.

It's a physics based fact that keeping a mass, such as an air car, airborne consumes more energy than a ground based rolling car. So unless they can figure out how to make an air car run on a renewable energy source, which has less energy than oil based fuels, it'll never happen, or at best, it'll happen as the last of oil reserves are used up, and it'll use them up faster yet on top of that.

Although not necessarily efficient to produce, you could run the vehicle, with probably few modifications, on alcohol.... And if you crash, you could pop open the tank for a swig to help kill the pain...

"It's a physics based fact that keeping a mass, such as an air car, airborne consumes more energy than a ground based rolling car"

That would only be true for a given mass. There are diesel powered airplanes in production [diamond-air.at] that get the equivalent of 20-30 mpg (US). Compare this to a Ford Excursion or Chevy Suburban and you will see that the airplane is actually more economical in fuel usage. It may well be more economical in total energy picture, factoring in manufacturing as well.
In addition, the DA40TDI runs on diesel. It is not currently certified to operate on biodiesel, but there is probably no technical reason it could not do so. (Yeah, yeah, the standard arguments against biodiesel like supposedly taking up all of our farmland to grow fuel, blah blah blah)
So your blanket statement does not hold up even with present technology.

It's a physics based fact that keeping a mass, such as an air car, airborne consumes more energy than a ground based rolling car.

No, it isn't.

There are far too many variables involved to make such a blanket statement: L/D ratio of the aircraft, mass, rolling resistance and air drag of the ground vehicle, terrain, speeds, stopping and starting, etc, etc.

As an extreme example, consider what kind of gas mileage a glider gets, even counting whatever gas is used to tow (or propel, for a motor-glider) it to altitude. Compare that to an SUV with under-inflated tires. Even a (non-gliding) Cessna gets better gas mileage than an SUV (I don't recall the exact numbers of the top of my head, aircraft fuel consumption is listed in gallons (or sometimes pounds) per hour.)

Now, something that relies on a fan instead of a wing for lift probably will have higher consumption, but you're blanket statement is simply false.

People have been predicting the end of oil for as long as we've known about oil...
At some point it might happen but you're not the first to claim it'll 'run out in 20 yrs'.
In reality, we continue to improve efficiencies in extracting oil and even ways of making oil that fundamentally challenge the historical thought that oil takes millions of years at extreme temp and pressure to produce.
And, we continue to find new sources of oil.
My point is, if the new sources dry up (Canada Oil Sand are a 'new' source that alone can keep the entire world supplied for decades)- If/When the 'new sources' don't materialize, we'll be working on improving extraction through efficiencis and conservation - more drastically than we are now (which isn't too drastic at all).
So, Oil running out - not likely in 20 yrs even at current levels of use and extraction.

"we will run out oil eventually... this running out will happen relatively abruptly, leading to something of a crisis in our society on account of our dependance on private transportation."

This is very much NOT true. We will not suddenly wake up one day and find all the oil gone. What will happen is that price of oil will slowly continue to rise for decades. This will facilitate a smooth transition from oil to alternative energy sources.

What most people don't understand about oil is that we dig up very little of the blackstuff. When we drop a well down and start sucking up reservoirs of this oil, we are really only dragging up the easiest to reach oil that is just sitting there. Most oil is left untouched due to the fact that it would be very expensive to remove it.

Three things are going to happen to make the cost of oil slowly rise as it is depleted.

1) Speculators will make sure that it rises slowly. Speculators watch the supply of oil and basically bet on how much it is going to cost in the future. While they do drive the price of the oil up by buying out supply, they also ensure a more even distribution over time of its distribution. For instance, if suddenly the oil companies were to announce that HOLY SHIT we are out of oil in a year, speculators would quickly buy up the supply and start parceling it away. The price absolutely would go up, but we wouldn't go from oil gushing out of our ears to being bone dry.

2) As the cost of oil is driven up, oil companies will naturally start digging up more expensive to extract oil. At $30 a barrel it makes no sense to go to an old oil well and start extracting all that stuff that takes $50 a barrel to extract. However, once the price of oil hits $100 per barrel, that $50 per barrel oil will make a tidy profit. So, as the cost for oil goes up, more and more expensive oil will be introduced to the market. The oil will not suddenly run out. Instead, more expensive oil will be introduced to the market that will slowly drive the price up.

3) As the cost of oil goes up, the demand for oil will go down. This is economics 101 supply and demand. Oil is the energy source of choice simply because it is relatively clean (compared to some thing), a very dense energy source, and extremely cheap. Today oil is cheap for the amount of energy you can make from it. The stuff is plentiful enough to fuel the world, and cheap enough for almost everyone to be able to buy it. This will not always be true. As the price goes up, more people will start to spend a few extra dollars to avoid having to shell out so much at the pump. Alternative energy sources will be comparatively cheaper then oil. People will move naturally away from oil. You can see a perfect of this by looking at Europe and the US. The US, where this is almost no taxation on oil, people own big ugly fuel hungry cars. In Europe, where the taxes on oil account for a full ¾ of the costs, people use significantly more fuel efficient cars and in general burn much less oil. Up the price of oil by 500% and even Americans will find it in their hearts (or more likely wallets) to be more fuel efficient.

The net result is that as the price of oil goes up, the consumption of the stuff goes down. As consumption goes down, the price slows its upward slope. The result is that you have a gradual increase in oil prices and a gradual move away from using it.

Moller is the worst snake-oil salesman in the entire history of aviation. He's been "nearly ready for production" for 20+ years now, and shows some rigged demo every time he needs a bit more investor money.

I like how the car in the video at 60 Minutes is "tethered" by a crane.

I've seen similar demonstrations before. The tether is necessary for liability insurance. If the prototype were to malfunction, the tether is necessary to contain any possible damage. Whether it would be possible to rig a demonstration with the tether I will leave for an exercise for the tin-foil-hat crowd.

And people complain now about SUVs. This is just what we need, even less fuel efficient modes of transportation.
These vehicles can represent a small niche market, but getting to a "highway in the sky"... forget-about-it

Regarding SUVs, the only people that complain about them are slashdotters. Ever take a look at the number of them on the highways lately?

The thing that I don't get about them, is the insurance. I can hardly afford (more justify the expense) to drive a land-locked car, which is pretty safe and (at least mine) inexpensive. Just imagine an accident with one of these things. Even a fender-bender could be very dangerous because you now add the extra dimension of gravity into the mix. Just for humor's sake,

you can get that now. it's called a private pilots license. unlike a drivers license it actually requires an IQ and SKILL to get and hold onto one. Hopefully in the future either a pilots license is required or they are automated so the braindead morons owning them will not be allowed to control it..

Personally, I have held my pilots license. I let it lapse cince family has taken precedence. but I remember that going from mid-michigan to chicago meigs was a super quick jaunt in that Piper Aero... having a quick lunch in downtown chicago between classes (2 hour break) was very doable when the school had their own grass airstrip.

Except, if Moller's specs are even close to right, traveling with two or three people to some harder-to-get-to places will involve using much, much less fuel than you'd use in a road vehicle, and we'd spend way less money, fuel, equipment, etc., maintaining roads into certain areas. And at 200 or 300 mph, you're getting someplace much more quickly than in a car, but with car-like gas mileage. With that time savings, you're going to see a lot of otherwise unecessary (and way, way less fuel-economic) traditional commuter flights end.

It's not like this is the sort of thing that people would be taking to the grocery store.

""Well, I've done the math. I think it's a modest number if you could sell a couple thousand, when you look at snowmobiles and quads and those things -- not cars," says Norris. "That's a big market. But if we sold say a couple thousand, $50,000 a piece, that's a billion dollars." "

A few people are sloppy and let couple refer to the "few", meaning, but most people prefer the definition referring to a pair.

Some are sloppier than others - depends on which one. No one will argue what a dozen means, most people ar clueless about a peck... couple, & few depend on who you are talking to. Not to mention some words have always had two meanings... one being ambiguous

From your garage to your destination, the M400 Skycar can cruise comfortably at 350+ MPH and achieve up to 28 miles per gallon.

I'll grant that this is probably just hype...BUT...

Only being able to travel on roads is a major inefficiency of cars. How much gas is wasted on all those turns and curves, not to mention traffic bottlenecks, etc? They bring this issue up if you follow the link. Also, the roads have to be maintained and that uses fossil fuels as well.

The Rotapower engine produces little NOx, the most difficult pollutant to eliminate. In addition, using a stratified charge combustion process greatly reduces the unburned hydrocarbons and carbon monoxide emitted....The Skycar's fuel-efficient engines and ability to run on regular automotive gasoline result in low fuel costs. The Skycar is significantly more fuel efficient in passenger miles per gallon than the tilt-rotor V22 Osprey, helicopters or

Never mind Homeland Security. What about the people whose houses these things are going to fall on when people without the skills required for a current private pilots license decide that "whenever they please" means during thunderstorms or when the clouds are generating ice or when the wind is gusting to 90 knots?

What about the people whose houses these things are going to fall on when people without the skills required for a current private pilots license decide that "whenever they please" means during thunderstorms or when the clouds are generating ice or when the wind is gusting to 90 knots?

Most likely you'll need a license and insurance in order to operate these things. In fact, mandatory insurance makes even more sense for these things then it does for cars. It's pretty easy to keep a car on the road. Keeping a plane in the sky is impossible to do with 100% certainty, no matter how skilled you are.

Im fairly sure these device wont be valid road going vehicals for a while atleast.I am wonder (fairly sure they will)if they will need to introduce a new license scheme for them and a whole new set of transit laws.The potential problems that machines like this could cause is immense if this is not as tightly regulated as standerd aircraft not to mention the cross with auto mobiles

However if these things are avaliable for 50k from people like Mr Morris then I will definantly be rather tempted to get when if i ever have money like that laying around(Lets hope some unknown rich relative dies).

I can't be 100% sure but i doubt these would fly in the same manner as standerd light aircraft , and if they are ment for the masses then.. well before we know we would have a rather cloged airspace and without tight controls that is a potential Disaster area , so some rather tight new license would be required

Not to mention that you kind of need a pilot's license to know where the non-restricted airspace is. From what I recall (It's been a while since I dabbled) 1 mile from municipal airports and up to 25 or 30 from an international airports require you to follow direction from air traffic control. That means that among other things you have to ask permission to enter the airspace and turn if you don't get it before you cross over or are denied. Certain classes of aircraft are simply not allowed in certain classes of airspace. I know this because my hang glider instructor misunderstood the regulations and landed at the Wilmington International Airport once and had to file some "Mea Culpa it Won't Happen Again" paperwork with the FAA over it. If that'd happened AFTER 9/11 he probably would have been arrested.

It's even worse when you're flying a powered aircraft, especially in crowded airspace. Not only are you navigating in 3 dimensions (Which actually is pretty easy to get used to) but you have to keep an eye out for other vehicles up to two or three MILES off and above or below you and follow air traffic control's instructions when they tell you to do something. Overall the amount of bullshit you have to put up with makes the occasional speed trap on the ground look pretty inviting.

In the end, the flying car experience will be a lot different from what most people imagine. I wouldn't be surprised if the only way it would be allowed would be with a computer controlled navigation system that had no allowance for manual override. Some people might opt to move up to pilots licenses for a craft they could manually control, but that would be about the equivalent of a CB radio enthusiast moving up to a ham license -- most people won't want to and it will bring as many new restrictions as it does newfound freedom.

So, do you advocate all cars being unable to accelerate beyond 65 miles per hour? Or all guns being able to sense if they're being used in self defense? How about MP3 players that can detect copyrighted music and refuse to play it? The lack of these features sounds like a "serious issue" to me.

It's a bit different when you are driving a car and you go in excess of the speed limit. This is going into restricted airspace where you need to be licensed in order to fly above it.

Second, the reliability of many rotary engines was shortened by idiot owners who didn't know how to treat them. This was really only an issue with the 3rd generation RX-7. Heat generated by twin-turbo charging caused a lot of the 1993-1995 cars to have premature engine failure. However this is not the case for other rotary cars which without the turbos last hundreds of thousands of miles. Even man

I don't know much about how that flying car works but if you consider the engine, it's limited by the carnot efficiency (sure carnot can get pretty big theoretical efficiencies at say, 900C) but I'd have to think that a car running off of a battery would be more efficient since the engine is MUCH smaller (I mean, that flying vehicle would need an engine much larger than any SUV on the road today) and batteries are not limited by carnot and could probably get maybe 40-50% efficiency.

Conserving energy is an absurd notion. We need to continue to grow the per capita energy allocation. People need more energy so we can do cool things like fly around in cars. Conservation is often confused with efficiency. I'm all for making systems more productive. But to actually curb energy "consumption" is outrageous. We need to find new, safe, and more plentiful ways to produce as much energy as possible. Perhaps (if you are one of these global warming nimrods) you could argue that we need to produce less CO2. However, that is not a conservation issue - it's a pollution issue.

The automobile has revolutionized our society - changed family life, geography, etc. The car's impact has been huge. While not everything the car has brought us has been good, on the whole, I'd say it's been worth it. While I doubt this "air-car" will take off any time soon, if it did, who knows what revolutionary impact it would have on mankind.

This "green religion" clamping down on progress reminds me of the Church crackdowns on science during the Reformation.

This is kind of like saying "I need to continue to grow my per day spending. I need to find new and more plentiful ways to make money. Having lots of money has change my life, where I live, etc... I'm not sure I can afford a yacht any time soon, but If could, wouldn't that be cool?"

It's true; spending energy is fun and has many positive benefits, but at the moment our primary energy source is oil, and it isn't renewable. One day, maybe we'll have some new, safe, and more plentiful energy "income" sources, but right now we don't. When you're out of work, spending all your cash reserves is a dumb thing to do, and that's what we're doing with oil, right now. There's no "energy Visa company" we can borrow from while we're out of oil and waiting for fusion or high-altitude wind generation, either.

It is, in fact, even worse than the cash analogy; development of new energy technologies requires energy. If we let our energy reserves drop low enough, eventually we won't have the resources required to invest in new energy technology. It's like driving down the highway, and being close to empty. It's nice that there's a gas station 40 miles up the road, but if you keep the pedal to the metal, and burn up all your gas in 20 miles, you're still fscked.

Oil production is getting to the point where supply is not meeting demand. Just last week crude oil hit record highs.

Just go to http://news.google.ca and search for oil.

This problem isn't going to go away but it will solve it self, oil and gas is going to be so expensive in a few years people will not be able to afford to drive to work or drive anywhere for that matter. Prices are expected to get up to $190 a barrel in the long run(before 2020). That means prices at the pump are goin

I think where you went off track was when you assumed that energy == oil. Oil is simply one currently used method of producing energy. To quote the grandparent directly:"We need to find new, safe, and more plentiful ways to produce as much energy as possible."

He does a good job at getting the press attention every year or so yet no real advances are made. the Moller skycar is still the same point it was 5 years ago. he still has not flown it (tied to a crane is not flying it) or anything else other than his PR stunt shows.

Lots of promises are made but nothing solid or real is ever shown or demonstrated, it always feels like the snake oil or perpetual energy people. Look at what I did! no you cant see how it works or it actually work in real tests.

how about he untether it and fly it across the country? Experimental aircraft licensing is really easy to get.

The Lemelson-MIT award does not have a very good track record, at least not from my POW. One example is the text on their web-page about Wilson Greatbatch, another lifetime award winner, which is seriously lacking in accuracy. (It talks about designing the first sucessful pacemaker implant, which is true only if "sucessful" is taken as "working for more than 9 months." If the time limit is set to anything less, the inventor is suddenly swedish...)

I think you're a little off. The British use 'billions' where an American would use 'trillion.' The British use things like 'thousand-million.'For both British and American counters a 'couple' thousand multiplied by $50,000 would be roughly one-hundred-million dollars depending on how strict or loose the person was being with a 'couple.'

It's a one seater.The driver/pilot position is open to the elements.It has no cargo carrying capacity (as far as I could tell.)Max speed 55mph, 2 hours of flight per tank.Skids only (no wheels), so you can't park it in a ramp/underground garage, so can't fly it to the city...

Cool toy? H3ll yeah. If I ever win the lottery (unlikely, as I don't play it) I'll be all over one of these. Replacement for a car? Bah.

It's a one seater.The driver/pilot position is open to the elements.It has no cargo carrying capacity (as far as I could tell.)Max speed 55mph, 2 hours of flight per tank.Skids only (no wheels), so you can't park it in a ramp/underground garage, so can't fly it to the city...

The first cars were much more limiting than that, I guess that is why they never "took off":)

Looking at the AirScooter video, and at thinking about the motorcycle handle and the lack of foot pedals, how does the pilot correct for uncommanded roll, as might occur in turbulence, or thermals, encountering wake turbulence,...?

"'You get in this vehicle, there's no vibration, takes you up and what's most exciting is your kind of being lifted up from below [...]'"

And:

"But he thought he'd ask anyways."

Gotta love that rigorous editing at CBS. I wasn't sure whether or not I had left Slashdot until I double-checked the address bar. Then I had to check again to make sure I hadn't wandered into a Limp Bizkit forum somewhere.

"Well, I've done the math. I think it's a modest number if you could sell a couple thousand, when you look at snowmobiles and quads and those things -- not cars," says Norris. "That's a big market. But if we sold say a couple thousand, $50,000 a piece, that's a billion dollars." [emphasis added]

2*10^3 * 5*10^4 = 10*10^7 = 100,000,000 != a billion

And this guy, Woody Norris, is the chief inventor? "Self-taught"?

I'd rather ride the bus. Or a flying car created by Woody from Cheers.

When I was a little kid I used to read all the time about these neat flying cars that were only a few years away, once the designers worked out a few kinks and the government figured out the regulatory side. As I've grown up I've continued to see these stories coming along, always promising that these guys have a new flying car that will be ready for consumers at some time right around the bend...

It ain't happening, folks. Now and then these guys might pick up an award or snowball another big team of journalists into reporting on their work, but safe, reliable, affordable flying cars that get reasonable fuel economy aren't going to happen any time soon. And when they do, they'll be tied up in regulatory and insurance messes for years, continuing to prevent wide adoption. At the rate this stuff is moving, by the these designs are ready for the market and the market is ready, the fossil fuels needed to run them will cost so much that people won't want them, and we'll get to wait another twenty years for hydrogen-powered models to arrive.

IIRC, the boards were actually suspended by metal arms from underneath which were removed in postprocessing. For the action shots the arm was mounted to a moving vehicle. Wires would not be stable enough to stand on... it would be like standing on a swing seat.=Smidge=